Blind Bargains

#CSUN14 Audio: Discovering Access to Microsoft SharePoint


You may not have heard of Microsoft SharePoint, but it's one of the most widely used collaboration tools used amongst large organizations including most of the Federal government. We spoke with Bruce Stover, Chief Marketing Officer for Discover Technologies, who explains how their company is bringing access to this widely-used program for both users and administrators. Blind Bargains audio coverage of CSUN 2014 is generously sponsored by the American Foundation for the Blind.

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Direct from San Diego, it’s BlindBargains.com coverage of CSUN 2014. The biggest names, provocative interviews, and wall-to-wall exhibit hall coverage, brought to you by the American Foundation for the Blind.

Looking for a quick and easy way to take notes at work, school, or home? AccessNote is the new specialized note taker app produced by the American Foundation for the Blind for use on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. With AccessNote, users with vision loss can easily take notes, create documents, and access applications on their mobile device. It is designed to be completely accessible, having all the features of a traditional note-taking device and more. AccessNote is available for $19.99 in the iTunes App Store.

Now, here’s J.J. Meddaugh.

J.J.: We’re here at CSUN 2014 with Bruce Stover. He’s the Chief Marketing Officer for Discover Technologies, and Discover Technologies is creating technologies to make Microsoft SharePoint accessible. Thanks for joining us on the podcast, Bruce.

BS: You’re welcome.

J.J.: Why don’t we actually start out at the beginning. I bet you a lot of our listeners might not even be aware of what exactly Microsoft SharePoint is and why this is potentially a very important thing to do.

BS: Sure. Microsoft SharePoint is the most successful product that Microsoft has ever developed. SharePoint is in use in 80% of the Fortune 500 companies and 90% of the federal government, probably about 50% of the state governments around the country. So it’s very prevalent in large organizations. What it’s for is to help people collaborate, share documents, edit documents. You can create a team within your organization, and your team can share documents amongst themselves, and then you can also publish them to the full environment.

The problem with SharePoint is it has not been very usable. It’s very tough the way it’s designed. It was designed for sighted people, of course, and their Accessible Mode does a little bit to make it better, but it really doesn’t make it that much usable. There are still menus that are hard to find and dropdown menus that you can’t get to, and some things are even hard-coded where they shouldn’t be.

So what we’ve done is we’ve changed the architecture. We’ve moved all of the chrome out of the picture and put everything on a left column view. So you have one column to go to, to find easily how to edit a document or how to edit a wiki or how to create a new team site. There are many things you can do very easily, very quickly, just by using that one left column. It works very well with all the assistive technologies, with JAWS, NVDA and so on.

J.J.: People are familiar perhaps more with the more consumer solutions, Google Docs and Microsoft Office online products. So how does SharePoint compare to something like that?

BS: Well, it compares – Microsoft does have a competitive product with Google Apps. SharePoint would be the most prolific collaborative platform, and it’s so far out there, it’s so widely distributed, that it has a big lead over Google or anyone else who’s trying to get into that collaborative environment.

J.J.: So I’m editing a document collaboratively with you or whatever, and I’m assuming SharePoint allows for you to make changes or me to make changes while we’re…

BS: Correct.

J.J.: How would the software, the accessibility solution, alert me that you just made a change on my document?

BS: There’s a tab on there called Alerts and Permissions, and you can set your alerts for whatever you’d like. If you’d like to be alerted every time your document is opened up, then it would send you an alert. You can also set up an alert in the usable mode that we have to let you know when folks have updated it or edited it. So it’ll come right to you.

J.J.: Are these going to be speech or sound, or how will these alerts pop up?

BS: With JAWS, they’ll be with sound.

J.J.: Okay. Are there additional extra scripts to go with JAWS? Is that what you’re saying?

BS: JAWS just reads the screen. These are all the scripts – they’re right for us.

J.J.: Okay, got you.

BS: So the alerts would be something that would show in our architecture.

J.J.: SharePoint extends beyond documents, right? There’s also other, as far as databases or PowerPoint and things like that?

BS: Yes, PowerPoints. You can store any kind of document in your repository and SharePoint can point to it. Once you put it into SharePoint, it becomes collaborative. So you can do Word docs, you can do PDFs, you can do PowerPoints, Excel spreadsheets. You can put anything in there, and then it’ll be usable and sharable.

J.J.: Sure. Looking at how you’ve implemented the solutions, you’ve mentioned a couple things about reorganizing the interface. What other considerations do you take into account to try to make this excel?

BS: What we did was we didn’t get a room full of sighted people and say “Wow, I bet we can figure this out.” What we did was we went the other way. We worked directly with the blind and low vision workers who were working with SharePoint, who knew what the problems were and told us how much trouble they were having. We worked to design solutions that they found very helpful.

When we went around with that method – we continue to do that as well. We have people who are using this right now in the FDA, and NFB is getting ready to add SharePoint, and they’re going to use our software on top of it. They were not going to add SharePoint unless they could use our software to get in there, because it’s that much of a difference.

The AFB also, Darren Burton just tested this product in the lab at AFB, and we’ve got a tremendous write up from those guys and a product evaluation. They compared SharePoint out of the box with our product, and we can send that report – we’ll have it on our website, but we can also send it to anyone who needs it.

J.J.: What’s your relationship with Microsoft? Of course, some would say that Microsoft should be doing this on their own, but that hasn’t happened.

BS: Microsoft has a lot going on. They created this for, again, sighted users, and they do some accessible things, but they haven’t focused on what we focused on. What we focused on is completely changing the architecture. It’s not just we’re fixing bugs or anything; we are actually a value-added service. We’re a Gold Partner of Microsoft, so we know the Microsoft folks and respect them very well, and we think that this product enhances – and we know it does – it enhances the usability by blind and low vision SharePoint workers.

J.J.: Do you feel, though, from a legal perspective – some would make the argument that by creating a custom solution like this, Microsoft is going to feel like they’ve been taken off the hook as far as having to create their own accessible solution.

BS: We hope they do feel like they’re taken off the hook and they use as their partner for this usability. Because we’ve put a lot of time and effort into it, and again, we’re a Gold Partner. So we could be their go-to service for this.

J.J.: Do you think at some point, would it be appropriate for them to try to integrate your solutions in directly and make it so it’s more widely available?

BS: We ride right on top of SharePoint, so they don’t have to add it to the stack. They can just say “If you’re looking for usability, talk to these guys over here.”

J.J.: Okay. Let’s talk about pricing for a second. What’s the model and how does it work?

BS: We have two licenses, two different kinds of licenses. One is by the person, by the user, so a seat license, for agencies that don’t have that many folks that are going to use it. And then we also have an enterprise license.

J.J.: And how much are those?

BS: The per seat license starts at $5,000, and the agency enterprise license would be somewhere around $50,000. And again, it would depend on the organization and how many people they have with it and what their environment was like.

J.J.: So $5,000 is a one-time cost, or is there upgrades involved there?

BS: We have different pricing models depending on, again, the organization and who’s using it.

J.J.: Okay. To put that in perspective, if you happen to know the cost for SharePoint in general to deploy that.

BS: SharePoint is millions of dollars. We’re talking about – most software for large organizations comes to seven figures. We’re talking about an enterprise class software here. We also have changed the way search is done. We’ve made it so it’s very easy to do search. As you know, being blind, when you do a search, you have a problem finding out where your information is within a document. If you open up a 100-page document, you have to go through the entire document and read it, have it read to you, from page 1 to find what you’re looking for.

J.J.: Or do a Find command.

BS: Or do a Find with a keyword. But we do semantic understanding, so we understand what your query is, what it means. And then we understand what each page means. Then we compare what the relevance is with all the pages within the documents, and we give you the most relevant page within that document based on your query.

J.J.: Got you. You’re going to give a keyboard command or a way to jump to that or whatever.

BS: Yes. And we have a link that says “most relevant page,” and you hit that and it goes right to the most relevant page, and it renders the most relevant page so you can read it before you open the document. So it even saves your environment bandwidth, since you’re only opening up one page of the document. Then you can go from there to the next most relevant page, or you can go forward and back and so on.

J.J.: How long has the software been around, and where do you see the future going?

BS: The search piece of it, we’re a 4-year-old company, but we were a 12-year-old company before that, and then we sold out to Autonomy. Then we started this new company four and a half years ago. This product has been out only six months. We started with FDA. Now, the search piece of it has been out for years, so we just incorporated that with our 508 solution.

Where I see it going is I see a lot of interest from a lot of organizations in making this work for their SharePoint environment. I also see training centers – we’ve had a lot of training centers come by, because the unemployment rate in blind and low vision is huge. It shouldn’t be that way. And what we have is we found a way that you can actually train blind and low vision users how to use SharePoint quicker than sighted users can learn SharePoint.

J.J.: Sure, a lot of times, especially if you’re using keyboard commands and things like that, it’s going to be a little more efficient than using the mouse and visual interface.

BS: Exactly. So we see this becoming offered in all 50 states, in all cities, because there are SharePoint administrator jobs that need to be filled. In almost every city, there’s a SharePoint job open right now, and someone could fill it by just learning to do these collaborative tasks.

J.J.: So it’s not just the actual users of SharePoint that would benefit; the administrative side of the software is all accessible as well?

BS: Yes.

J.J.: Does that pretty much have a web-based interface, or is it online, or how does that work?

BS: We have two different ways with SharePoint. One is online and the other one is on premise.

J.J.: Okay. Are those both accessible?

BS: Yes.

J.J.: If people want to get more information, what’s the best way to do that and learn more?

BS: Go to www.discovertechnologies.com, and you can also send me, bstover@discovertechnologies.com, an email. I’ll be happy to help you out.

J.J.: And how do you spell that?

BS: Discover, D-i-s-c-o-v-e-r, Technologies, T-e-c-h-n-o-l-o-g-i-e-s, .com.

J.J.: And Bstover?

BS: B, S-t-o-v-e-r, (at) discovertechnologies.com.

J.J.: Great. Thank you so much, Bruce.

BS: I appreciate it.

For more exclusive CSUN coverage, visit www.blindbargains.com, or download the Blind Bargains app for your iOS or Android device. Blind Bargains CSUN coverage is presented by the A T Guys, www.atguys.com.

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J.J. Meddaugh is an experienced technology writer and computer enthusiast. He is a graduate of Western Michigan University with a major in telecommunications management and a minor in business. When not writing for Blind Bargains, he enjoys travel, playing the keyboard, and meeting new people.


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